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For greater than a decade, Genaro García Luna was the square-jawed public face of Mexico’s warfare towards its largest felony mafia: the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Whereas main the nation’s model of the F.B.I., from 2001 to 2005, he personally took down prime narco-traffickers like Arturo Guzmán Loera, the brother of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious drug lord often known as El Chapo.
Over the subsequent six years, as Mexico’s public safety secretary, he used expertise and gloves-off would possibly to seize different cartel figures. And in that cabinet-level function, Mr. García Luna helped the president on the time, Felipe Calderón, launch an aggressive battle towards drug cartels that spawned a brand new wave of violence throughout the nation.
However all of the whereas, amid the headlines and acclaim from companions in Washington, Mr. García Luna was main a double life, American prosecutors say. Regardless of his public picture as a lawman, they preserve, he was secretly taking bribes from the identical drug gang he had a status for pursuing.
On Tuesday, greater than three years after his arrest close to Dallas, Mr. García Luna will go on trial in Federal District Courtroom in Brooklyn, accused of being a part of a unbroken felony enterprise.
In alternate for years of graft, prosecutors say, he helped the cartel’s traffickers to soundly transfer their merchandise into the US, keep away from scrutiny by Mexican legislation enforcement and, at instances, perform brutal assaults towards their rivals.
The trial can even be set towards a bloody historic backdrop: the internecine warfare between Mr. Guzmán and one other group of traffickers, his friends-turned-rivals, the Beltrán-Leyva brothers. The battle claimed the lives of lots of of individuals, together with a few of Mexico’s prime cops.
The El Chapo trial produced a number of revelations that landed like grenades in the US however precipitated a lot much less of a stir in Mexico.
Allegations that the nation’s most infamous drug lord paid a $100 million bribe to a former Mexican president? Not front-page materials for the nation’s newspapers. Ten straight responsible verdicts for Mr. Guzmán? The nation collectively shrugged.
Mexicans, who had been intimately aware of the grotesque violence inflicted by the nation’s crime bosses, didn’t appear shocked by the horrible issues El Chapo was mentioned to have carried out.
However the trial of Mr. García Luna is anticipated to have a extra far-reaching affect. He’s the highest-ranking Mexican official ever to face trial in an American courtroom on drug trafficking expenses, and his indictment in December 2019 managed to shock a rustic the place corruption is seen as a reality of life. Out of the blue, the person most related to kneecapping drug cartels was accused of colluding with one all alongside.
Since then, Mexico’s former prime legislation enforcement official has turn into a logo of the nation’s damaged police drive, utilized by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s president, to justify his rising reliance on the army to fight cartel violence.
The case towards Mr. García Luna might additional implicate two former top-ranking police officers who had been charged with him however stay in Mexico: Luis Cárdenas Palomino and Ramón Pequeño García.
It might even have profound penalties for the opposition within the run as much as an important presidential election in 2024, presumably harming the conservative Nationwide Motion Social gathering that Mr. García Luna served.
“If they’re able to forcefully and clearly show his affiliation with an essential felony group, it might be an enormous blow to the opposition,” mentioned Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexico Metropolis safety analyst.
Not like the El Chapo trial, Mr. Guerrero mentioned, this case might genuinely shock Mexicans by uncovering the interior workings of a corrupt system virtually everybody believes exists, however few have seen up shut.
“The García Luna case is sort of a trunk full of secrets and techniques that may very well be made public,” Mr. Guerrero mentioned. “It looks as if we’re going to be taught quite a lot of issues we had no concept about.”
Amongst these most anxious to be taught the main points of the investigation, it appears, is Mexico’s president. Mr. López Obrador has repeatedly careworn how essential it’s for the media to carefully cowl the case and for the general public to study it. He even had his international minister clarify, in a latest information convention, the method of jury choice within the trial.
“It is extremely essential that every one that is identified, that or not it’s reported on, in order that it doesn’t occur once more,” the president mentioned this month.
After taking workplace in 2018, Mr. López Obrador disbanded the Federal Police, which Mr. García Luna had as soon as led. He changed that drive with the Nationwide Guard, which was lately put underneath the command of the army.
“I don’t need the Nationwide Guard to finish up just like the Federal Police, that was underneath the management of individuals like García Luna,” Mr. López Obrador mentioned at a information convention in September. “That federal police grew to become rotten.”
Mr. García Luna heads to trial barely greater than two years after a failed try by federal prosecutors from the identical Brooklyn workplace to deliver a corruption case towards one other essential Mexican official: Salvador Cienfuegos, the nation’s onetime protection minister. Mr. Cienfuegos was arrested on the Los Angeles airport in late 2020 on a sealed indictment accusing him of taking profitable payouts from the H-2 cartel, a violent offshoot of the group run by the Beltrán-Leyva brothers.
However after stress from Mexico, U.S. prosecutors dropped the fees, citing diplomatic considerations, and returned Mr. Cienfuegos to his homeland, the place he was in the end allowed to renew a standard life. The debacle successfully ended the will and talent of American legislation enforcement to analyze corruption allegations in Mexico, together with some towards targets much more vital than Mr. Cienfuegos.
In making their case towards Mr. García Luna, prosecutors plan to argue that he used his energy not solely to help the cartel, but in addition to cowl up his personal wrongdoing. He funneled cash from “a corrupt kickback scheme,” court docket papers say, to journalists at a Mexican information group to cease them from “publishing unfavourable tales about him.” He subjected one reporter specifically — believed to be Anabel Hernández — to “a multiyear marketing campaign of harassment and threats,” the papers say, due to her work investigating him.
Prosecutors declare that Mr. García Luna continued committing crimes even after he moved in 2012 to Miami, the place he opened a safety consulting enterprise that employed most of the similar contacts he had made in legislation enforcement and intelligence circles in each international locations.
In Miami, court docket papers say, he befriended members of a rich Mexican household, the Weinbergs, who ran their very own array of safety firms and supplied him with entry to “a multimillion-dollar residence and yacht.”
César de Castro, Mr. García Luna’s lawyer, plans to argue that his shopper has at all times been a professional lawman and that the federal government’s cartel witnesses have leveled false corruption allegations towards him as a belated type of revenge.
The protection additionally intends to assault the bribery claims by arguing that Mr. García Luna didn’t arrive in the US with riches and that no matter trappings of luxurious he in the end had he both paid for on his personal or acquired from the Weinbergs.
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